dissertation critique speak white

Revisiting “Speak White”: A lieu de mémoire Lost and Found in Translation

Carmen Ruschiensky

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Carmen Ruschiensky Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada [email protected]

Online publication: Nov. 8, 2019

An article of the journal TTR

Volume 31, Number 2, 2e semestre 2018 , p. 65–87 Minorité, migration et rencontres interculturelles : du binarisme à la complexité

This article traces the afterlives of Michèle Lalonde’s 1968 poem “Speak White” to explore how translation contributes to constructing, renewing and transforming it as a lieu de mémoire through various transformative processes. The term “translation” here designates a phenomenon that includes but extends beyond the concept of translation as linguistic transfer to encompass different forms of rewriting, adaptation and remediation, foregrounding the generative aspect of the memory site as well as the tension between past and present, between a lieu de départ and its reinscription in a new context. Specifically, it focuses on two English translations of “Speak White” that attempt to reconstruct the poem’s subversive diglossia; Marco Micone’s 1989 poem “Speak What,” as a rewriting that takes the form of serious parody; two adaptations produced during the 2012 Quebec Student Strike, “Speak Red” and “Speak rich en tabarnaque”; and the latest incarnation of “Speak White” in Robert Lepage’s 887 , a theatrical production that introduces its own layers of intertemporal, intermedial and interlingual complexity. These recreations of “Speak White” reveal how a lieu de mémoire can be simultaneously anchored or re-anchored in the past while also being renewed or rerouted through translation in the present across languages, cultures, media and time.

Speak White,
Speak What,
2012 Quebec Student Strike,
Robert Lepage,

Cet article retrace les après-vies du poème de Michèle Lalonde « Speak White » (1968) afin d’explorer comment la traduction participe à sa construction, son renouvellement et sa transformation en tant que lieu de mémoire à travers des processus transformateurs divers. Le terme « traduction » désigne ici un phénomène qui inclut, mais dépasse le concept de la traduction comme transfert linguistique pour englober des formes diverses de réécriture, d’adaptation et de remédiation, mettant l’accent sur l’aspect génératif du lieu de mémoire ainsi que sur la tension entre le passé et le présent, entre un lieu de départ et sa réinscription dans un nouveau contexte. Précisément, il se concentre sur deux traductions en anglais de « Speak White » qui tentent de reconstruire la diglossie subversive du poème ; « Speak What » de Marco Micone (1989), une réécriture qui prend la forme d’une parodie sérieuse ; deux adaptations produites durant la grève étudiante au Québec en 2012, « Speak Red » et « Speak rich en tabarnaque » ; et l’incarnation la plus récente de « Speak White » dans 887 de Robert Lepage, une production théâtrale qui introduit ses propres niveaux de complexité intertemporelle, intermédiale et interlinguistique. Ces récréations de « Speak White » révèlent comment un lieu de mémoire peut être à la fois ancré ou réancré dans le passé tout en étant également renouvelé ou détourné par la traduction dans le présent à travers les langues, les cultures, les médias et le temps.

Mots-clés :

grève étudiante de 2012 au Québec,

Article body

Introduction: je me souviens.

When asked in a 2002 interview what Quebec’s official motto Je me souviens means, Robert Lepage answered that nobody really knows:

Is it the past? Is it a vengeance? Is it Quebec saying “I will remember what has been done to me?” Does it mean, Je me Souviens in the sense, “I remember that I am different, I remember my language: I’m in a society where its cultural expression, its first cultural expression which is French, is being forgotten?” So do I have to be reminded that I have to not forget this language? It means many things, Je me Souviens. It is about solving the past [...]. So much of Quebec is about remembering. [1] cited in Dundjerović, 2003, p. 18

Memory is often valorized where identity is problematized. Vulnerable groups are driven to defend and protect their cultural memory, their lieux de mémoire , because, as Pierre Nora writes, “without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away” (1989, p. 12). Michèle Lalonde’s poem “Speak White,” written in 1968 and performed by the author during the Nuit de la poésie in 1970, is a lieu de mémoire par excellence, both emblematic of an era and continually generating new forms and interpretations. The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s ushered in unprecedented changes on many levels. The wave of political reforms that marked the end of the “Grande Noirceur” associated with the Duplessis regime were followed by a cultural effervescence that celebrated the French-Canadian (thereafter rebaptized “Québécois”) language and identity. This cultural movement found a powerful form of expression in performance—poetry, song and theatre, the latter of which Michel Bélair, writing in 1973, described as “one of the driving forces behind Quebec’s parallel cultural affirmation and quest for political autonomy” (1973, p. 9; my trans.). Towards the end of the 1960s, the counterculture movement contributed to this revolutionary spirit in appealing to a young generation seeking an alternative way of life and seduced by “the charm of a discourse that seemed new and stimulating in its claim to combine the double aspiration of Marx and Rimbaud: change the world, change your life” (Duchastel, 1986, p. 62; my trans.).

This paper traces the afterlives of “Speak White” to explore how translation contributes to constructing, renewing and transforming it as a lieu de mémoire through various transformative processes. The term “translation” here designates a phenomenon that includes but extends beyond the concept of translation as linguistic transfer to encompass different forms of rewriting, adaptation and remediation, foregrounding the generative aspect of the memory site as well as the tension between past and present, between a lieu de départ and its reinscription in a new context. Specifically, I will consider two English translations of “Speak White” that attempt to reconstruct the poem’s subversive diglossia; Marco Micone’s 1989 poem “Speak What,” as a rewriting that takes the form of “serious parody”; two adaptations produced during the 2012 Quebec Student Strike, “Speak Red” and “Speak rich en tabarnaque,” and the latest incarnation of “Speak White” in Robert Lepage’s 887 , a piece that introduces its own layers of intertemporal, intermedial and interlingual complexity.

Sites, Frames and Networks of Memory

Nora introduced the concept of lieux de mémoire to account for what he saw as a rupture with history. He described lieux de mémoire as being both immediately available to concrete sensory experience but also susceptible to the most abstract elaboration. They are, at once, material, symbolic and functional, insofar as even a material site, like an archive, only becomes a lieu de mémoire when the imagination has invested it with symbolic meaning. But if the main purpose of a memory site is to block the work of forgetting, Nora also insists on the idea that lieux de mémoire “only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications” (1989, p. 19). A lieu de mémoire is both a site of excess closed upon itself, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations—an object mise en abyme ( ibid. , p. 20).

Though the multi-volume project Lieux de mémoire directed by Nora (1984-1992) has been criticized for its nostalgic bent and, especially, its exclusive focus on national history, [2] the concept itself, the idea that memory sites are not only open to continual reiterations but also constructed and reconstructed through them, remains pertinent. This dynamic, generative dimension of lieux de mémoire is not incompatible with current approaches in memory studies that seek to go beyond what Astrid Erll refers to as the “container-culture” model. As Erll observes, the container model is not only “ideologically suspect” but also “epistemologically flawed,” because it fails to account for a range of mnemonic phenomena whose main frameworks of cultural memory are not defined by territory, ethnicity or nationality—there are also social classes, generations, religious communities, subcultures, global diasporas and lieux de mémoire arising from travel, trade, war, and colonialism (2011, p. 8). Erll proposes the term “travelling memory” to describe “the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders” ( ibid . p. 11).

This shift in focus gives rise to apparently diverging concepts of cultural memory—site- and source-based memory (roots), on the one hand, versus travelling, transcultural and transmedial memory (routes), on the other. [3] But taken together, these two strands suggest a multitude of “re-” and “trans”-membering possibilities that are arguably part of the same complex phenomenon, one that can be best described as translational. Translation, like memory, entails both meaning-preserving and meaning-making. Translation, like memory, can seek to be “faithful” to an originating source but it also implies movement, change and sometimes conflict. A translational perspective indeed highlights how Nora’s lieu de mémoire , much like Walter Benjamin’s “afterlife,” is based on a dynamic of continuity through transformation: “Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity or similarity” (1999, p. 70). [4]

Social and medial frameworks also play a crucial role in these re- and trans-membering processes. Maurice Halbwachs’ (1925) concept of collective memory was based on the idea that all individual memory has a collective, social dimension. Individual memory is shaped through “social frameworks” ( cadres de mémoire ): “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize and localize their memories” (Halbwachs, 1992 [1925], p. 28). Jan Assmann (2008) and Aleida Assmann (2008), for their part, emphasize the cultural dimension of collective memory. Cultural memory is “exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms, that, unlike the sounds of words or the sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent” (J. Assmann, 2008, p. 111). However, even in these formalized, enduring forms, the past is not “preserved” but rather is cast in symbols through myths, writings, performances, and continually “illuminating a changing present” ( ibid. p. 113). Cultural memory, in other words, is mediated, emerging at the junction between the individual and the collective, between culture understood as “a subjective category of meanings contained in people’s minds” and culture conceived as a repertoire of “publicly available symbols objectified in society” (Olick, 1999, p. 336).

Lieux de mémoire considered as translational phenomena encompass all of these layers of complexity, along with the various transformational processes that they engender. As we will see in the case of “Speak White,” a memory site can be both a source and a resource, reinvested and transformed, lost and found in translation.

Speak White: Quelle langue?

As Lise Gauvin has observed, the “language question” has traversed Quebec’s history and literature with exemplary consistency, as no other issue has. “Speak White” was written and first performed at a moment when Quebec’s “ surconscience linguistique ,” as she calls it, was at a peak, informed by an awareness of language as a space of friction and fiction, an object of anxiety and doubt, but also a privileged laboratory, open to endless possibilities (Gauvin, 2001, p. 17). The Parti pris writers, for example, saw the degradation of the French language as inseparable from the economic and cultural domination of the French-Canadian people. French Canadians were told to “Speak White,” to speak English, the language of the master, the language of the boss.

It is in this context that Michèle Lalonde’s poem was written and performed, first during one of the events of the Poèmes et chansons de la résistance, in 1968, and then recited by Lalonde during the infamous Nuit de la poésie of 1970. On the night of March 27, 1970, more than 4000 people lined up outside L’Église du Gesù on Bleury Street in Montreal to hear poets of all ages and regions of Quebec. As Pascal Brissette has observed, this event, often described as “la grande messe,” was also an unprecedented encounter with a public that far outnumbered the traditional readership of Quebec poetry (2014, p. 55). Jean-Claude Labrecque and Jean-Pierre Masse filmed the event for the National Film Board of Canada. Among the artists present were Gaston Miron, Claude Gauvreau, Nicole Brossard, Paul Chamberland, Michel Garneau, and many others.

The poem’s title references not only the racist expression but also other works of the period that drew comparisons between the French-Canadian experience and that of other oppressed peoples, the most obvious being Pierre Vallières’ Nègres blancs d’Amérique (1968). As Lalonde remarked in an interview at the time, “[l]a langue ici est l’équivalent de la couleur pour le noir américain. La langue française, c’est notre couleur noire!” (cited in Mezei, 1998, p. 234). Lalonde’s reading of “Speak White” was one of the evening’s most memorable moments. It touched what was, and still is, that sensitive cord—Gauvin’s “ surconscience linguistique .” An injunction against economic and political oppression and humiliation, the denigration of the French language, and the imposition of the Anglo-Saxon language and culture, “Speak White” delivered a message that resonated and has since become emblematic of the period.

Two English translations of “Speak White” were published in 1970, one by D. G Jones in the bilingual poetry journal Ellipse and the other by Ben-Zion Shek. Both juxtapose French and English versions. The act of translating any work into the colonizer’s language is problematic from the outset. But Lalonde’s use of code-switching to subvert the colonizer’s language further complicates the translation of this poem into English. Below, we see how the presence of English in the original is represented in the translations:

Two English translations of “Speak White”

-> See the list of tables

In Jones’ translation, English is indicated in bold, whereas Shek uses italics. The use of code-switching increases as the poem progresses, culminating in the final two stanzas, with the original poem switching again to French in the last two lines. The presence of English in the French text also includes references to British history and literature, and American and British place names and monuments—Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wall Street, and so on. References to business and money often appear in English: “get down to brass tacks,” “tell us that God is a great big shot and that we’re paid to trust him,” “speak white,” “big deal,” “speak white as on Wall Street, white as in Watts” (Hayward, 1994, p. 175).

The code-switching reproduces the unequal relations between French and English, what both Ben-Zion Shek (1977) and Sherry Simon (1994) have characterized as a literary diglossia (Mezei, 1998, p. 235). Lalonde’s “Speak White” is emblematic of this dynamic. But English is not an intrusion here. The poem appropriates the English language and Anglo-Saxon lieux de mémoire to dethrone them ( ibid. , p. 236). It is worth noting that Canadian-English references are absent from the poem ( ibid. , p. 245; Gauvin, 1995, p. 20). As Kathy Mezei has observed, the British and American cultural references emphasize their foreignness in the Québécois context: Lalonde’s strategic use of English is intended to construct borders rather than bridges (1998, p. 238). Yet, as D. G. Jones explained in an interview with Mezei, he translated “Speak White” because he identified with the poem’s sense of frustration, estrangement and angry impotence ( ibid. , p. 239). Thus while the English versions fail to reproduce the poem’s subversive diglossia, they reconstruct “Speak White” as a lieu de mémoire in relation to the broader context of civil rights protests and movements of the period. As Mezei notes, Lalonde’s poem “articulated in another language the protests of a generation fighting the Vietnam War, social conformity and American cultural and economic imperialism” ( ibid. ).

Speak What: Parlons-nous

Marco Micone’s 1989 rewriting of the poem as “Speak What” introduces a very different dynamic. Shocked by the adoption of Bill 178, an amendment of the French Language Charter prohibiting the use of languages other than French on public signs, Micone decided to write a text that would be “mi-politique mi-littéraire” (cited in Gauvin, 1995, p. 22). While the use of code-switching is much less present in Micone’s poem, the ambiguous interplay between the “nous” and the “vous” already at work in “Speak White” is amplified. At the outset, it would appear that Lalonde’s “vous” refers to Anglo-Saxons, while “nous” refers to the French-speaking Québécois people. But further into the poem, the identity of “vous” is extended to include other imperial powers and colonizers around the world, and the “nous” comes to represent all colonized and oppressed peoples. As Annette Hayward has observed, although the poem’s earlier references to the working class, empires, and strikes foreshadow this deictic shift, it transforms the poem’s anti-English nationalist discourse into an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist one, reflecting, according to Hayward, an ideological shift already taking place in 1960s Quebec that Lalonde’s “Speak White” perhaps actively contributed to (1994, p. 177).

Micone revisits the poem from an immigrant’s perspective. His “vous” refers to French-speaking Québécois as the new masters and bosses, whereas immigrants take the place of the “nous,” the exploited underclass. The sixth stanzas of “Speak White,” Micone’s “Speak What,” and the latter’s English translation, are presented in Table 2 below. We note in the last two lines here in “Speak What” the only use of English in Micone’s poem, apart from the refrain of the title:

“Speak White” compared with “Speak What”

French Quebeckers now speak in the voice of the bosses. The singular shift to English draws attention to the line “you sound like them more and more.” Does the use of English here imply that the French Québécois bosses are literally speaking English, or are they simply speaking the language of power?

The excerpt presented in Table 3 (next page) includes the deictic shift noted by Hayward. We see in Lalonde’s lines on the left that the colonizers speak the language of Shakespeare and Longfellow but they also speak a pure and atrociously white French in Vietnam and Congo: Micone’s rewriting brings this distant French colonialism home to Quebec, inviting the Québécois to impose their French language, not a problem, he seems to imply. But the “nous,” the immigrants of Quebec, are here, and “nous” (we) can tell you stories about war and torture and poverty. The final stanza acknowledges collectively shared memories of suffering and humiliation, rather than setting them in opposition and competition: “nous sommes cent peuples venus de loin pour vous dire que vous n’êtes pas seuls” [“we are a hundred peoples come from afar to tell you that you are not alone”] (Micone, 2001, p. 15; 2008, p. 85).

Though a number of critics, including Lalonde, denounced Micone’s rewriting as a plagiarism if not an outright act of aggression, Lise Gauvin, Pierre Nepveu and others interpreted it as an homage to Quebec literature. As Gauvin writes:

La meilleur hommage que l’on puisse rendre à un texte n’est-il pas de s’en inspirer, sous forme de pastiche ou de parodie ? Le texte qui sert de point de départ, s’il est assez fort, ne peut que sortir grandi de l’aventure. 1995, p. 22

She interprets the “what” in “Speak What” as referring not to “which language,” but rather “what are we talking about?” or even, “let’s talk” ( ibid. , p. 23). She also maintains that describing “Speak What” as a plagiarism is patently absurd, that no one could possibly imagine Micone not intending his poem to be read as a direct reference to Lalonde’s. Gauvin characterizes Micone’s poem rather as a hypertext that takes the form of a “serious parody” following Gérard Genette, who defines parody as a transposition:

le fait de chanter à côté, donc de chanter faux, ou dans une autre voix, en contre chant – en contrepoint, ou encore de chanter dans un autre ton : déformer, donc ou transposer une mélodie. 2003 [1982], p. 20

Both “Speak White” and “Speak What” also function as manifestos. While “Speak White” targets two groups, the group to mobilize and the group to attack, Micone’s “Speak What” brings these groups together, as we see in the last stanza, noted above. As Jeanne Demers and Line McMurray have observed, a key element of the manifesto genre is derivation and reiteration. “Le véritable manifeste,” they write, “paraît rarement en solitaire, il est le plus souvent marqué par un phénomène de réiteration” (Demers and McMurray, 1986, p. 12). “Speak What” translates “Speak White” through parody and transposition, and reconstructs it as a memory site through reiteration. With “Speak What,” Micone does not simply appropriate “Speak White” to use it as a premise for a new work. “Speak What” is constructed in dialogue with “Speak White” and is thus a perfect example of a creative appropriation whose “restaging and re-enacting depends on the audience’s prior knowledge of the source” and thus “acquires its status precisely because of the visible presence of the source within it” (Maitland, 2017, p. 117). “Speak What” is an invitation to dialogue and an invitation to return to a lieu de mémoire , to a past that is a source of Québécois affirmation, but that excludes, from Micone’s point of view at the time of writing, the immigrant experience in Quebec. It thus reconstitutes but also translates this memory site over time and across cultural difference. As confrontational as it is, “Speak What” seeks to build bridges rather than borders.

Speak Rich Over our Dead Bodies

More recently, two adaptations of “Speak White” were produced and performed during the 2012 Student Strike in Quebec—“Speak Red” by Catherine Côté-Ostiguy and “Speak rich en tabarnaque” by Marie-Christine Lemieux-Couture. The strike began as a student protest against post-secondary education tuition hikes. By the end of March there were 300,000 students on strike, and tens of thousands out in the streets. It evolved into a broader civil movement with the passing of Bill 78, which restricted public assembly. As one of the student spokespersons, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, observed at the time, “[t]en years of accumulated anger against the Charest government spilled out into the streets” (2012, n. p.), and tens of thousands of students and citizens were soon “casseroling” [5] every night. The movement also spawned a proliferation of creative endeavours. Students mobilized to produce posters, art, installations, blogs, comics strips, films, music, and translation collectives, among many other initiatives.

Within this highly charged and volatile atmosphere, the rewritings and remediations of “Speak White” served as powerful vehicles for mobilizing collective memory and for decrying “the destruction of Quebec’s social-democratic heritage” ( ibid. ). They also served to highlight the original poem’s themes of economic and political oppression, thus anchoring their critique of the Charest government’s neo-liberal policies within a historical context. While both student adaptations make use of code-switching, they foreground social and economic issues over linguistic and cultural ones. As we see in Table 4 below, the poem “Speak Red” closely adheres to the structure of “Speak White,” while “Speak rich” deviates from the original model formally, but still invokes a number of its references and themes.

“Speak White”/”Speak Red”/”Speak rich en tabarnaque”

The references to the rapport Parent and the Révolution tranquille in “Speak Red” are particularly relevant, as they serve as reminders of the reforms that Jean Lesage’s Liberal government implemented to make education accessible to the francophone majority at the time that “Speak White” was written—in stark contrast to the Liberal government’s policies in 2012. The use of English also serves, as in the original poem, to highlight the influence of American imperialism, here with reference to the American credit-rating agencies Fitch, Moody’s, and Standard and Poor’s, the red square of the student movement symbolizing being “carrément dans la rouge.” So we read, in English: “As if we don’t know about how you lead a financial crisis” and “Speak rich over our dead bodies” (Lemieux-Couture, 2012, n. p.). And again, the following line: “Give us an American dream” ( ibid. ). Both “Speak Red” and “Speak rich” also reproduce the shifting modes of address used in “Speak White.” While “vous” refers in the opening stanzas to the government, to corporate interests, it is later used as a rallying call to address the students. The final lines of “Speak Red” echo “Speak White”: “nous savons que nous ne sommes pas seuls” (Côté-Ostiguy, n. p.), whereas “Speak rich” ends with “Commencez-vous à comprendre que vous êtes seuls ?” (Lemieux-Couture, n. p.). The “vous” in “Speak rich” clearly refers to the Charest government, while the “nous” in “Speak Red” represents the students. This “nous,” however, remains ambiguous. Indeed, the “nous” in all of the poems considered here, including Lalonde’s “Speak White” and its English translations, is a “nous” that eventually transcends linguistic and ethnic borders. It is a “nous” bound in its opposition to economic, political and cultural imperialism. The rewritings and remediations of “Speak White” during the 2012 student strike both renew and reroute the originating text, highlighting a rupture with the past but also an effort to reclaim it.

887 : Translating Memory, Staging Difference

Robert Lepage’s 887 is a theatrical production about memory and forgetting that makes “Speak White” a central motif. Though the choice to use this poem came at the end of the creative process (Lepage and Fouquet, 2018, p. 53), it serves as a kind of resource and “continuity object” for the piece. [6] In the play, Lepage is invited to recite the poem for a 2010 event commemorating the 40 th anniversary of La Nuit de la poésie of 1970. He finds himself unable to memorize the words of the poem by heart, but the exercise plunges him into the past, into this period of his life between 1960 and 1970, and its interwoven individual and collective memories. The number 887 represents the address on Murray Street in Quebec City where he grew up. The apartment block itself was the original resource for the piece ( ibid. ). Like the poem, it is a touchstone, a means for constructing a piece of theatre, but also for reconstructing his memory of personal experiences associated with the building itself, the family and neighbour relationships that unfold within it, and, more broadly, events of the period that would in retrospect become important historical moments: the visit of the Queen of England in 1959, Charles de Gaulle’s “Vive le Québec libre” speech in 1967, the reading of the FLQ Manifesto on Radio-Canada in 1970, and so on.

Playing himself, solo on stage, Lepage incarnates two main roles—the “real” Robert Lepage, who addresses the audience directly as the narrator of anecdotes, stories and events, and the “fictive” Robert Lepage, who speaks and interacts with other characters (present only in the audience’s imagination) in various acted scenes. In the first case, Lepage makes use of the “memory palace” technique, based on remembering events, people, and so on, by associating them with places and spaces that are easily recalled to mind. His verbal narration is accompanied by the various ways that he physically manipulates and transforms different scenographic elements, often models of varying scales, which allow him to illustrate the story, all the while implicating us, the spectators, in the memory-reconstruction process. When incarnating his more fictionally presented character, it is the Robert Lepage who is trying to memorize the poem for the event, which he manages eventually to do. Lepage recites “Speak White” in its entirety in the last scene of the piece in front of the fictional audience of the commemorative event, the audience that we now come to embody.

The direct-address scenes are not always clearly demarcated from the acted scenes. Nor is it really clear, in the end, which Robert Lepage seems more “real” and which, more “fictive.” This is because the piece, through his performance and the various media engaged, continually shifts between transparency and opacity, between effects of illusory immediacy that draw us in and modes of hypermediacy that remind us of the mediation process and create distance. This dynamic has been described as “hypermediality.” As Jean-Marc Larrue explains:

The concept of theatrical hypermediality, which goes well beyond that of hypermediacy as propounded by Bolter and Grusin (2000), seems to be particularly appealing insofar as it not only does not raise the question of representation but also, bearing in mind the “window” metaphor evoked above [representation is not a window onto the world but “windowed” itself], the concept of hypermediality does not make it necessary to choose between looking at and looking through. Even better, it even accommodates both actions simultaneously, which perfectly suits contemporary theatrical practices! 2016, n. p.

Indeed, Lepage in narrative mode, though addressing us directly, at times takes a stance that seems more like that of a history professor (or neuroscientist, when explaining how memory works in the brain), and, other times, he slips into poetry. These shifting registers create distancing effects, though we as spectators are still sharing the “same” space and still feel we are in the presence of the “real” Robert Lepage. During the “acted” scenes, we have the illusory experience of being a fly on the wall of Lepage’s private life, looking not “at” but “through” to “another” space ( inside his current apartment, not outside the scaled-down apartment block of his childhood memory). However, due to the moving sets (that Lepage moves himself), the imaginary characters that we have to invent, and the imaginary dialogues that we have to fill in, the illusion of immediacy continually breaks down. The permeable fourth wall becomes evident within the first few minutes of the performance, as Denys Arcand explains in his preface:

Dans 887 , on a l’impression qu’il n’y a pas de décalage entre Robert et son personnage. Nous sommes avec lui, dans sa cuisine, avec ce pauvre Fred de Radio-Canada. Nous sommes avec lui aussi quand il entre sur scène, au début, pour nous demander, en toute simplicité, d’éteindre nos portables, et qu’insidieusement, par un glissement de virtuose, il enclenche la magie du spectacle. 2016, p. 7

The resulting hypermediality creates a theatrical event that depends on “the performativity of all concerned (actors, artists and spectators) [and] the concomitant primacy of the experiential over the representational” (Larrue, 2016, n. p.). Lepage’s various processes of memory reconstruction directly implicate us, as he sorts and sifts through personal and collective memories of the period, which are not hierarchized in the moment, and as he attempts to memorize the poem. As audience members and spectators, we thus take part in this memory reconstruction, in this intermedial and intertemporal translation of “Speak White.” Performance, media and technology are seamlessly integrated to create what is ultimately an intimate experience, regardless of what type of reality—here/there, actual/pretend, past/present—we are supposed to be taking part in. As Lepage has remarked:

At the beginning of theatre, centuries ago, the actor spoke with the spectator in front of the fire. Fire is a natural element, but its use marks the beginning of technology and at the same time the beginning of theatre: afterward, all the various uses of fire became painting, cinema, video. Fire was replaced by technology, it supplies electricity, but people still come to the theatre to sit down around the fire. cited in Monteverdi, 2003, p. 6

La prise de parole en français

From its opening in Toronto in 2015 [7] and continuing into 2018, 887 has been touring the world to acclaim. As in Lepage’s previous work, translation is thus a recurring preoccupation, both on and off the stage. In Amsterdam, 887 was performed in English with Dutch surtitles; in Barcelona, it was performed in French with Catalan surtitles. It is sometimes performed exclusively in French (Montreal, Quebec City, La Rochelle, Le Havre) or exclusively in English (Denmark, Norway). The National Arts Centre in Ottawa has staged French-only and English-only productions. For English audiences, it is often performed in both French and English with English surtitles. The choice of performance language and use or not of surtitles undoubtedly depends on many factors, but the bilingual versions are notable. Clearly the use of surtitles is not, in these cases, a communicative necessity—the piece could just as easily, perhaps more easily—be performed entirely in English, without the introduction of surtitles (which are sometimes distracting). The choice to perform part in French, including, of course, the performance of “Speak White,” likely has more to do with the presencing of French on the stage. [8] As renowned Quebec theatre translator Linda Gaboriau has remarked, the greatest challenge in translating Québécois playwrights is their preoccupation with language, the constant awareness of the importance of speaking French:

In all Quebec theatre, there is an omnipresent, invisible character and that is the Québécois language. The presence of that spoken language, whatever level the playwright might have chosen, is a statement in itself. A statement of cultural survival, aspiration and communion. Quebec audiences are aware of this dimension and consciously involved in this experience of hearing Québécois on stage. This dimension of theatrical language is impossible to capture in translation. This is one of the reasons why I’ve chosen not to dilute the so-called wordiness of some Quebec texts, the love of holding forth, that Quebec playwrights often allow their characters to indulge in. It is an indirect way of communicating the importance that Québécois playwrights give to the “ prise de parole en français ” [...]. 1995, p. 86

I attended two performances of 887 , one in Montreal, performed in French, the other in Toronto, performed in French and English with English surtitles. [9] In the Toronto version, the switching between French and English directly mirrors, with few exceptions, Lepage’s shifting modes of address and presentation: when addressing the audience, he speaks English; when “in character,” in dialogue with other characters, he speaks in a vernacular Québécois French. Though the English surtitles are well integrated into the set, they are indeed (I tried following them at times) a distraction. As an element that works in tandem with the piece’s intermediality, this could have two contradictory effects for an audience member who understands English only (which I experienced vicariously by trying to follow the surtitles). On the one hand, it makes the “acted” scenes, the scenes during which we are “looking through” to a Robert Lepage who no longer shares our ontological space, more distant, which the presence of the French language, its otherness, amplifies. The non-French speaker thus has access to the illusion, but is simultaneously blocked, hindered in understanding the conversations taking place. One wonders, for example, how English speakers fill in the imaginary lines of dialogue of the imaginary character “Fred de Radio-Canada.” This nonetheless recreates an authentic experience of hearing a language that is not understood and trying to understand what is happening all the same. On the other hand, the presence of the surtitles distracts from being immersed in the fiction and brings us back to or keeps us on the surface, where we are constantly aware of the mediation. The bilingual performance, the code-switching, thus provides a very effective translation of “Speak White” in recreating the poem’s disorienting diglossia. It taps into a kind of official bilingual, bicultural memory by suggesting a “need” for translation and difference in perspectives: Toronto audiences, generally, are not likely to share with Montreal audiences the same collective memory of the October Crisis, for example. The presence of both languages on stage is thus a way to “remember French” (“I remember that I am different, I remember my language”) (Lepage, cited in Dundjerović, 2003, p. 18) and also re-imagine (translate) the memory sites of the Quiet Revolution as they might be remembered in English Canada—as something taking place in an “other” language and somewhere else. As Jane Koustas has observed, the “two solitudes,” though perhaps a tired cliché, is still very much a part of the Canadian cultural imagination (2016, pp. 5-6).

As Erll and Rigney argue, it is through medial processes that meanings and memories enter and circulate within the public arena and “ become collective” (2012, p. 2; italics in the original). Media of all sorts—spoken language, books, photos, films, and so on—shape experience and memory, both as instruments for sense-making (mediating between the individual and the world) and as agents of networking (mediating between individuals and groups) ( ibid. , p. 1). Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation” adds a third factor—“the mediation of mediation” (1999, p. 55). Indeed, lieux de mémoire trigger individual memories that depend on prior knowledge of memory sites through exposure to their previous mediations. (Erll, 2012, pp. 110-111). But just as sites of memory do not remember by themselves (Rothberg, 2010, p. 8), ideas, practices and memory do not circulate by themselves. An idea or practice “requires a force to fetch it, seize upon it for its own motives, move it, and often transform it” (Latour, cited in Gal, 2015, p. 231). This entails going beyond asking “what is the meaning of a phenomenon—the symbol, the text, the action, the other —to asking what these things mean to me ” (Maitland, 2017, p. 138; italics in the original). It entails, in other words, translation. As Sarah Maitland observes:

Difference is everywhere and we must reach outwards to engage with it, in an attempt to encapsulate that which we do not know within terms that we do. This outward-facing gesture of incorporation transforms the objects of translation irrevocably. But it also has the effect of causing us to question who we are and what it means to understand along the way [...]. 2017, pp. 27-28

The recreations of “Speak White” discussed in this paper reveal how a lieu de mémoire can be simultaneously anchored or re-anchored in the past while also being renewed or rerouted through translation in the present—across languages, cultures, media and time. Cultural memory emerges at the intersection of subjective experience and objectively shared external forms, lieux de mémoire that are material, functional and symbolic, but that are constituted through the very fact of their recreation, reiteration, and transformation. These can be described as “re-” and “trans”-membering processes that are inherently translational , based on a dynamic of continuity through transformation.

In revisiting “Speak White” as a lieu de mémoire, as a generative site of new interpretations, the English translations of “Speak White,” Marco Micone’s “Speak What,” the students’ “Speak Red” and “Speak rich,” and Robert Lepage’s 887 , elicit a reflection on the relation between the past and the present, on memory and forgetting, and, especially in Lepage’s case, on the refusal to forget to not be deprived of life, to not be deprived of meaning. In 887 , Lepage confronts what is lost in memory and translation in order to identify what can be found. Like Borges’ character Pierre Menard, [10] Lepage is finally able to recite Lalonde’s poem by creating it anew, “word for word and line for line” (Borges, 1998 [1939], p. 91). And, like Menard, he does not achieve this by projecting himself into the past and becoming the author. Instead, he translates it across time, through the lens of his own personal experience, so he can re-enact it as Robert Lepage, a man “composing” with his past to become a subject rather than an object of history.

Biographical note

Carmen Ruschiensky holds an MA in Translation Studies and is currently completing a PhD in Humanities at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. Her research explores the translation and mediation of cultural memory in Quebec. Her published articles can be found in Archivaria (2017) and the forthcoming volume Relire les revues québécoises : histoires, formes et pratiques (E. Guay and R. Nadon, eds., 2020). As a translator she specializes in the French-to-English translation of social sciences and humanities texts. Recent published translations include David Le Breton’s book Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses (2017) and essays by Simon Harel and Alexis Nouss in Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life (Sherry Simon, ed., 2016).

The use of Je me souviens dates to the construction of Quebec’s Parliament Building (1877-1886). Architect Eugène-Étienne Taché chose to adorn the main entrance of the building with the coat of arms assigned by Queen Victoria in 1868, to which he added a motto of his own invention (though its origins are disputed). The motto regained prominence in 1978 when the recently elected Parti Québécois government (1976) chose it to replace the La belle province slogan on the province’s automobile license plates (Deschênes, 2007, n. p.).

Michael Rothberg, for example, critiques the project’s linear narrative of historical progress, its “nostalgic plotting of loss, reduction of Frenchness to the Hexagon, and, especially, its elision of France’s long and complex colonial and postcolonial history” (2010, p. 6).

On “roots” and “routes,” see Clifford (1997).

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A Sociologist Examines the “White Fragility” That Prevents White Americans from Confronting Racism

By Katy Waldman

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In more than twenty years of running diversity-training and cultural-competency workshops for American companies, the academic and educator Robin DiAngelo has noticed that white people are sensationally, histrionically bad at discussing racism. Like waves on sand, their reactions form predictable patterns: they will insist that they “were taught to treat everyone the same,” that they are “color-blind,” that they “don’t care if you are pink, purple, or polka-dotted.” They will point to friends and family members of color, a history of civil-rights activism, or a more “salient” issue, such as class or gender. They will shout and bluster. They will cry. In 2011, DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” to describe the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged—and particularly when they feel implicated in white supremacy. Why, she wondered, did her feedback prompt such resistance, as if the mention of racism were more offensive than the fact or practice of it?

In a new book, “ White Fragility ,” DiAngelo attempts to explicate the phenomenon of white people’s paper-thin skin. She argues that our largely segregated society is set up to insulate whites from racial discomfort, so that they fall to pieces at the first application of stress—such as, for instance, when someone suggests that “flesh-toned” may not be an appropriate name for a beige crayon. Unused to unpleasantness (more than unused to it—racial hierarchies tell white people that they are entitled to peace and deference), they lack the “racial stamina” to engage in difficult conversations. This leads them to respond to “racial triggers”—the show “Dear White People,” the term “wypipo”—with “emotions such as anger, fear and guilt,” DiAngelo writes, “and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation.”

DiAngelo, who is white, emphasizes that the stances that make up white fragility are not merely irrational. (Or even comical, though some of her anecdotes—participants in a voluntary anti-racism workshop dissolving with umbrage at any talk of racism—simmer with perverse humor. “I have found that the only way to give feedback without triggering white fragility is not to give it at all,” she remarks wryly.) These splutterings “work,” DiAngelo explains, “to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy.” She finds that the social costs for a black person in awakening the sleeping dragon of white fragility often prove so high that many black people don’t risk pointing out discrimination when they see it. And the expectation of “white solidarity”—white people will forbear from correcting each other’s racial missteps, to preserve the peace—makes genuine allyship elusive. White fragility holds racism in place.

DiAngelo addresses her book mostly to white people, and she reserves her harshest criticism for white liberals like herself (and like me), whom she sees as refusing to acknowledge their own participation in racist systems. “I believe,” she writes, “that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color .” Not only do these people fail to see their complicity, but they take a self-serving approach to ongoing anti-racism efforts: “To the degree that white progressives think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived.” Even the racial beliefs and responses that feel authentic or well-intentioned have likely been programmed by white supremacy, to perpetuate white supremacy. Whites profit off of an American political and economic system that showers advantages on racial “winners” and oppresses racial “losers.” Yet, DiAngelo writes, white people cling to the notion of racial innocence, a form of weaponized denial that positions black people as the “havers” of race and the guardians of racial knowledge. Whiteness, on the other hand, scans as invisible, default, a form of racelessness. “Color blindness,” the argument that race shouldn’t matter, prevents us from grappling with how it does.

Much of “White Fragility” is dedicated to pulling back the veil on these so-called pillars of whiteness: assumptions that prop up racist beliefs without our realizing it. Such ideologies include individualism, or the distinctly white-American dream that one writes one’s own destiny, and objectivity, the confidence that one can free oneself entirely from bias. As a sociologist trained in mapping group patterns, DiAngelo can’t help but regard both precepts as naïve (at best) and arrogant (at worst). To be perceived as an individual, to not be associated with anything negative because of your skin color, she notes, is a privilege largely afforded to white people; although most school shooters, domestic terrorists, and rapists in the United States are white, it is rare to see a white man on the street reduced to a stereotype. Likewise, people of color often endure having their views attributed to their racial identities; the luxury of impartiality is denied them. (In outlining these discrepancies, DiAngelo draws heavily on the words of black writers and scholars—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, Ijeoma Oluo, Cheryl Harris—although, perhaps surprisingly, she incorporates few present-day interviews with people of color.)

In DiAngelo’s almost epidemiological vision of white racism, our minds and bodies play host to a pathogen that seeks to replicate itself, sickening us in the process. Like a mutating virus, racism shape-shifts in order to stay alive; when its explicit expression becomes taboo, it hides in coded language. Nor does prejudice disappear when people decide that they will no longer tolerate it. It just looks for ways to avoid detection. “The most effective adaptation of racism over time,” DiAngelo claims, “is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.” This “good/bad binary,” positing a world of evil racists and compassionate non-racists, is itself a racist construct, eliding systemic injustice and imbuing racism with such shattering moral meaning that white people, especially progressives, cannot bear to face their collusion in it. (Pause on that, white reader. You may have subconsciously developed your strong negative feelings about racism in order to escape having to help dismantle it.) As an ethical thinker, DiAngelo belongs to the utilitarian school, which places less importance on attitudes than on the ways in which attitudes cause harm. Unpacking the fantasy of black men as dangerous and violent, she does not simply fact-check it; she shows the myth’s usefulness to white people—to obscure the historical brutality against African-Americans, and to justify continued abuse.

DiAngelo sometimes adopts a soothing, conciliatory tone toward white readers, as if she were appeasing a child on the verge of a tantrum. “If your definition of a racist is someone who holds conscious dislike of people because of race, then I agree that it is offensive for me to suggest that you are racist when I don’t know you,” she writes. “I also agree that if this is your definition of racism, and you are against racism, then you are not racist. Now breathe. I am not using this definition of racism, and I am not saying that you are immoral. If you can remain open as I lay out my argument, it should soon begin to make sense.” One has the grim hunch that such an approach has been honed over years of placating red-faced white people, workshop participants leaping at any excuse to discount their instructor. DiAngelo, for all the outrageousness she documents, never comes across as anything other than preternaturally calm, patient, and lucid, issuing prescriptions for a better world as if from beneath a blanket of Ativan. Her almost motorized equipoise clarifies the book’s stakes: she cannot afford to lose us, who are so easily lost.

Self-righteousness becomes a seductive complement to “White Fragility,” as gin is to a mystery novel. (“I would never,” I thought, when DiAngelo described the conversation in which her friend dismissed a predominantly black neighborhood as “bad,” unsafe.) Yet the point of the book is that each white person believes herself the exception, one of very few souls magically exempt from a lifetime of racist conditioning. DiAngelo sets aside a whole chapter for the self-indulgent tears of white women, so distraught at the country’s legacy of racist terrorism that they force people of color to drink from the firehose of their feelings about it.

The book is more diagnostic than solutions-oriented, and the guidelines it offers toward the end—listen, don’t center yourself, get educated, think about your responses and what role they play—won’t shock any nervous systems. The value in “White Fragility” lies in its methodical, irrefutable exposure of racism in thought and action, and its call for humility and vigilance. Combatting one’s inner voices of racial prejudice, sneaky and, at times, irresistibly persuasive, is a life’s work. For all the paranoid American theories of being “red-pilled,” of awakening into a many-tentacled liberal/feminist/Jewish conspiracy, the most corrosive force, the ectoplasm infusing itself invisibly through media and culture and politics, is white supremacy.

That’s from a white progressive perspective, of course. The conspiracy of racism is hardly invisible to people of color, many of whom, I suspect, could have written this book in their sleep.

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Dead Girls, Female Murderers, and Megan Abbott’s Novel “Give Me Your Hand”

By Louis Menand

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« En 1989, la parution du poème Speak What dans les Cahiers de théâtre Jeu a provoqué de vives réactions. Un écrivain, surtout un immigrant, peut-il se permettre d’écrire des vers aussi explosifs sur une question aussi délicate que la langue au Québec ?Voici pour la première fois en livre le texte de Speak What. Présenté par son auteur, le poème est suivi d’une analyse de Lise Gauvin qui le situe dans la littérature québécoise et en fait ressortir toute la richesse. » (Quatrième de couverture)

Documentation critique

BLASCHECK, Birte, « From “Speak White” to “Speak What” : Bilingualism versus multiculturalism in Quebec », mémoire de maîtrise, Department of Foreign Languages, West Virginia University, 2004, 61 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract « The linguistic question has always been a preoccupation of the Québécois. Today, English and French are the two official languages of Canada, but the French-speaking population, a minority in Canada and a majority in Quebec, risks losing its privileged status in the face of the increasing number of other ethnic groups. This study examines the changing issues of language, culture, and identity in Quebec by comparing “Speak White” by Michèle Lalonde and “Speak What” by Marco Micone. Using a multidisciplinary cultural approach which includes literary, historical, and socio-economic studies, it establishes the context in which each poem was written and explores the relationship between both as a model for understanding the changing dynamics in the relationship of power as defined by bilingualism and multiculturalism. »

La version PDF du mémoire est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest. ###

HURLEY, Erin Jane, « Styling a Nation : Theatre and belonging in Québec », thèse de doctorat, Graduate Faculty in Theatre, City University of New York, 2000, 235 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract « How is a nation invented ? And how does that invention come to be lived as fact by those who would be its nationals ? These two questions are fundamental to scholarly work on the nation in the social sciences and in postcolonial studies. “Styling a Nation : Theatre and Belonging in Québec” proposes that some of the more productive and provocative answers to these questions are supplied by the practices and analytical tools of theatre and performance. I take as my case study the production of le fait national (the national fact) and its attendant identity in the postcolonial “cultural nation” of Québec, locating these processes in the material practices of québécois theatre and cultural performance. I propose the concept of “style” as the means for investigating the naturalization of the invented nation. I argue that québécois style, or québécité , as practiced in and disseminated through theatrical and cultural performance, is the means by which the national fiction is reproduced as fact. “Styling a Nation” examines the changing contours of Québec nation-ness, or québécité , from 1967 to 1999 in relation to national movements within Québec and Canada and to global systems, including anticolonial political movements, intercultural theatre, transnational capitalism, and immigration. Through extended analyses of four different performance forms, this dissertation queries performance’s various contributions and challenges to the indépendentist nation project and examines its potential for modeling new forms of québécité . Chapter one analyzes the concept of the nation across a range of disciplines, using the 1967 World’s Fair as a locus of competing national discourses. Chapter two analyzes dramatic realism as the preferred style of québécité during the cultural nationalist period of the early 1970 in Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs . Chapter three focuses on dance-theatre troupe Carbone 14 and their performative investigations of québécois history during the 1980s and 1990s. Chapter four considers the trans-national style of Montreal’s globe-trotting circus, the Cirque du Soleil. Finally, the Epilogue examines the stresses of immigration and the pressures of linguistic assimilation on québécité through two manifesto-poems : Michèle Lalonde’s “Speak White” (1971) and Marco Micone’s “Speak What” (1986). »

La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest . ###

GAUVIN, Lise, « Manifester la différence. Place et fonctions des manifestes dans les littératures francophones », Globe : revue internationale d’études québécoises , vol. 6, n° 1 (2003), p. 23-42. +++ Article de revue

### Résumé Dans quelle mesure le rapport de l’écrivain à la langue et à la littérature est-il déterminé, au Québec et dans les Antilles, par une « surconscience linguistique »? C’est ce que cette étude examine, en se penchant dans un premier temps sur deux manifestes québécois, ceux de Michèle Lalonde et de Marco Micone. De celle-là à celui-ci, on passe de l’affirmation de l’identité nationale face à la domination de l’Autre (l’anglophone) à l’affirmation de la participation de l’Autre (l’immigrant) à la littérature québécoise. Puis, dans un deuxième temps, l’on compare la position des auteurs de L’éloge de la créolité .###

KILLICK, Rachel, « In the Fold ? Postcolonialism and Quebec », Romance Studies , vol. 24, n° 3 (novembre 2006), p. 181-192. +++ Article de revue

### Abstract « Quebec, frequently omitted from discussions of francophonie, has also, until quite recently, figured little in postcolonial debate, though the variety and complexity of its experience as both colonizer and colonized from the sixteenth century to the present suggest a particularly fertile field for postcolonial analysis. However, Quebec’s aspirations as a francophone metropole in the Americas mesh uneasily with postcolonial theorizations of North Africa and the Caribbean, or India and the British Commonwealth, that emphasize the recovery of voice by indigenous, non-European communities, or the importance of hybridity and non-hierarchical intercultural exchange. This essay provides an outline of the major colonial and postcolonial elements in Quebec’s history, and offers three brief examples of postcolonial readings in respect of Michel Tremblay’s play, Les Belles–Soeurs , Michèle Lalonde’s poem Speak White and Marco Micone’s response poem Speak What , and Robert Lepage’s film Le Confessional . It notes, however, despite high-profile nationalist aspirations over the last forty years, Quebec’s persistent sense of itself as a pays incertain . This perception, it is argued, shapes Quebec’s ambivalence towards postcolonial theorizations, since these, in promoting the claims of the periphery, may simultaneously be seen as challenging not only the dominance, but indeed the very notion, of a metropolitan centre, on which for so long Quebec’s dream of nation has been fixed. » ###

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How to Write a Dissertation Critique: Examples & Guide 2024

Dissertation critique writing develops the students’ critical and logical thinking abilities. When composing, the students learn to analyze the works conducted by other researchers.

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

To critique a dissertation, you should:

Thoroughly read the paper.
Take notes and summarize the text (you can even try and use auto summarizer for that).
Interpret and evaluate the dissertation.
Develop a structure for your critique.
Write it and polish your writing style.

In this article, we will discuss the aspects of the dissertation critique writing in detail. Our experts gathered essential tips regarding the subject. Follow these easy instructions and check the dissertation critique examples to present a profound analysis.

📝 How to Critique?
✍️ Writing Style
🖥️ Where to Get?
✏️ Thesis Critique

📝 How to Critique a Dissertation?

First of all, choose a written dissertation published within the last five years for writing your dissertation critique. Alternatively, you can order a custom dissertation writing . The dissertations should present some empirical research based both on primary and secondary data analysis.

Before you start writing, you would need to get ready. The first step would be to conduct a critical reading of the thesis. While reading, you can ask yourself the following questions :

What is the purpose of the dissertation?
Did the author convince you with the help of their evidence?
Is there any bias in the text?
How did the text affect you?

Put down notes while you’re reading. It will help you critique the work more thoroughly.

Just in 1 hour! We will write you a plagiarism-free paper in hardly more than 1 hour

When writing a thesis critique, remember that it should include the following points:

Information about the dissertation and its contents.
Interpretation of the text, where you explain its meaning after a thorough analysis.
Evaluation of the work, where you discuss its validity and importance.

Mind that you should be impartial when writing a dissertation critique. Your paper is intended to give the reader a general assumption of the work they never studied before and present its profound analysis.

See the structure with dissertation critique examples :

1. A critique starts with an introduction . It includes the name of the author, the title, and the main points of the dissertation. There can also be some background information about the author, e.g., other works they have written, the work’s thesis statement (usually it can be found on the first page), and the author’s hypothesis.

E.g., The author of the dissertation participated in a Dissertation Fellowship program.
E.g., The purpose of the thesis is to determine the best methods of teaching mathematics to pre-schoolers.
E.g., The author hypothesizes that mathematics should be taught using games.

2. Then, write a summary of the dissertation. Discuss the research conducted by the author, the methods they used, and their findings. The overview should cover all the critical information in the thesis. But don’t make it too lengthy—two pages will do.

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E.g., The author conducted their research on two separate groups of children. One group was studying mathematics through games, the other learning it by rote.
E.g., The results show that games are more effective than learning by rote

3. After the summary, you can begin your critique . Write about the dissertation’s strong and weak points, its style, effectiveness, credibility, etc. Bear in mind that your opinions should be informed and well-grounded. Don’t forget to support your critique with evidence from the text!

E.g., The small sample size chosen by the author (only 30 participants) doesn’t allow to generalize their findings.
E.g., There is bias in the author’s assumptions that makes their research less credible.

Finally, write a conclusion . Here you can summarize the key points of your analysis and comment on the significance of the research. You may also give the direction for future research.

E.g., A larger sample will help to make the findings more accurate.
E.g., Further research is needed to establish the most effective ways of teaching mathematics to pre-schoolers.

✍️ Dissertation Critique: Writing Style

There are some rules regarding critique writing . For example, the length of the dissertation critique is about five pages. It is done in prose-style according to academic writing requirements.

Here are some of the most popular dos and don’ts on academic style writing :

Formal texts often use third-person pronouns and rarely uses the pronoun “I.”
In academic writing, the passive voice is often used.
When writing in formal style, you avoid vague and slang expressions .
It is objective and is characterized by the frequent use of examples .
Formal words are frequently used (e.g., “therefore,” “furthermore,” “NB”).
In academic writing, you avoid contractions , because they are considered colloquial (use “do not” instead of “don’t,” “it is” instead of “it’s,” etc.)
The same goes for abbreviations , such as, e.g. (“for example”), etc. (“and so forth”), and others.
You can use so-called power words , such as “superlative” and “benevolent,” which are more precise than “the best” or “kind.”
Use formal reporting verbs , such as “persuade,” “examine,” argue,” object,” etc.
Avoid emotional words , e.g., “extremely” or “terrible.” They make you sound less objective.
Reference other texts often, and cite references correctly (e.g., in Chicago, Oxford, Harvard referencing style)

Don’t forget to ask your professor if they have their requirements for the dissertation critique writing style!

Get an originally-written paper according to your instructions!

🖥️ Where to Get a Dissertation Critique Sample?

We hope that our recommendations will help you write a comprehensive critique of a Ph.D. thesis or a Master’s dissertation. However, you may still need a sample to give you an even better idea about writing. If so, there are some options for you.

First of all, you can ask for help from your professor .

They can provide you with a written outline and give some personal recommendations. Remember that they are there to guide you, and don’t be afraid to ask questions! Also, it is essential to ask for clarification if there’s anything you don’t fully understand.

Secondly, you can try to find one online .

Better use academic websites . These are the most credible resources that are most likely to use the right formatting style. Such websites usually end with .edu or .gov . If you can’t find the samples you need, look for similar things, such as a research article critique sample. It would be even better if you look for a template on your university’s page . Different universities often use specific guidelines, so you better make sure that the sample you’ve chosen is correct.

Finally, go to the library and find a free template there.

It is especially useful if your university doesn’t provide a free online one. A template can be stored on the library computer in PDF format or kept as a physical document. It will cost you nothing, and the library personnel will be there to help you. Just don’t be afraid of asking, and you’ll do your best!

Check our dissertation critique examples .

Many people have always thought that a dissertation is the synonym of a graveyard for young and struggling scholars. Well, not anymore!

✏️ How To Critique A Thesis?

You probably know that academic works can differ significantly from discipline to discipline. A thesis in social sciences will have little in common with a dissertation in commerce. The good news is that all of them are critiqued according to similar rules!

Here’s what you need to know:

Different parts of a thesis need to be critiqued differently. You can do it by answering questions associated with various sections of your analysis. You don’t have to answer them all. Pick the most suitable ones, and you are ready to write a perfect critique.

☝️ Thesis Statement Critique

First, you should analyze and evaluate the thesis statement. It is the most critical part of the dissertation because it represents its entire purpose in a couple of sentences. Many criteria should be met in a good thesis statement, including clarity and brevity.

Evaluating the thesis statement, answer these questions:

What is the problem stated by the author?
Are there variables involved?
Is it possible to test them properly?
Is the problem significant?

📚 Literature Critique

Here you should discuss the way the writer used the literature. In other words, you are critiquing the theoretical framework of the thesis. It should include the definitions of all the terms used in the text and the pre-existing research and background information. See if the dissertation you’re reviewing meets these criteria!

Also, you can try to answer the following questions:

What are the primary references cited by the writer?
Are any of the sources outdated?
Is the literature well-chosen?
Does the theory provide enough background information?

🧐 Hypothesis Critique

The hypothesis is the expected answer to the research question. It is either proven or disproven throughout the dissertation. While it’s still hypothetical, it should be grounded in theory. And, naturally, it must be well-formulated.

Evaluate the dissertation’s hypothesis according to these criteria, and answer the following questions:

What is the hypothesis of the dissertation?
How does it relate to the problem statement and purpose?
What kind of research is required to prove the hypothesis?
Is the hypothesis far-fetched? Is it testable?

🔬 Research Critique

While evaluating the dissertation’s research, you can do the following:

analyze the effectiveness of the methodology chosen (consider its strengths and weaknesses),
say what can be done to improve the methods applied, if necessary;
explore the methodology matching the research questions.

Here are some questions you can try to answer in your critique:

What type of research design does the author use?
Is the type of data collection used in research adequate?
What kind of sampling did the author use?
Is the sample size sufficient?
Are the measurement methods used in the study effectively?

🧪 Research Results Critique

In this section, you analyze the way the results are presented, their importance for the research. Also, you should evaluate the way the author interprets the results, whether alternative interpretations are suggested. Say if you find them valid and explain why.

Some other questions that you can cover:

Are the results relevant?
Can they be generalized? Are they biased?
Did the author calculate validity and reliability?
Do the results support the hypothesis?

🖊️ Writing Style Critique

Here you describe the following:

The writing style of the author: their keeping to the formal style, clarity of descriptions, logic, and coherence of the ideas proposed;
Grammar, spelling, the format and the style mistakes made by the author;
Your general impression of dissertations writing.

The following questions can help you with this section:

Is the dissertation well-structured?
Is the text too long, or too short?
Do all the chapters include introductions and conclusions?
Is there any plagiarism in the thesis?

📎 Final Recommendations

In conclusion, you can discuss the relevance of the work to other existing researches on the problem, the work’s innovations and contribution to the field, and possible improvements that you may suggest.

Here are some questions for your dissertation critique conclusion:

Is the hypothesis proven or disproven?
What generalizations are made in the text?
What recommendations concerning future research does the author give?
How can the results of the dissertation be applicable in practice?

And your critique is done!Thanks for reading the article! Share it with peers who might find it helpful, and good luck with your dissertation critique.

Any published research gets some opinions and qualitative analyses from its readers. An article that assesses a dissertation according to some standards is a dissertation critique. It is usually about five pages long and is written in an academic style.

To critique a thesis like a pro, you should remember some rules. Be as objective as possible. Only assess the paper, not the topic/author/etc. Be careful with your statements; write thoughtfully and politely. Make sure to structure your critique appropriately.

You should begin with an outline for your critique. Start with an appropriate introduction, then make a body with a few well-structured points. Conclude logically. Ensure that you pay attention to methodology, provide examples to your statements, and remain polite, concise, and objective.

To write an appropriate Introduction, have the key points of the body already in place. Give a high-level overview of the dissertation (field of science, topic, etc.) In the Introduction, do not go into identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each chapter yet.

🔎 References

Writing an Article Critique: Ashford University
Writing in Academic Style: University of Technology Sydney
How to Critique a Research Paper: University of Michigan
Critical Analysis: Southeastern Louisiana University
Writing a Critique: Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Dissertation Critique: Academia
Writing a Critique: University College London
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I’m so happy to find your post on dissertation critique writing! Thanks a lot for it! This is a really helpful blog! I’m fond of it!

Thanks for highlighting the main aspects to consider when writing a dissertation critique. The author of the post seems a real expert in dissertation critique writing!

Good ideas for my Ph.D. study!

Home > ETD > DISSERTATIONS > AAI1489286

“Sounding white”: African-American attitudes toward “whiteness” in the speech of African-Americans

Amanda L Strickland , Purdue University

The purpose of this study was to examine what it means to be an ethnic community member and be told that you “sound white”. This was done by interviewing members of the African-American community. The information from personal interviews and focus groups was analyzed using thematic analysis. Multiple themes were revealed regarding the definition of “sounding white”, emotional and social consequences, and acceptance into the African-American community. Although multiple definitions of what it means to “sound white” were revealed in this exploratory research, it can be concluded that to sound “white” means to speak “proper” English, talk in an educated manner, or overly formal. These findings suggest that reverse language discrimination exists within the African-American community amongst non-AAVE [African American Vernacular English] speakers. An African-American’s speech can be viewed as a measure of his or her Blackness. With this knowledge, linguistic programs should be implemented to promote language diversity and acceptance amongst the AAVE speaking community and combat linguistic discrimination.

Roberts, Purdue University.

Subject Area

African American Studies|Black studies|Communication|Sociolinguistics

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Open access
Published: 21 October 2022

Talking with racists: insights from discourse and communication studies on the containment of far-right movements

Benno Herzog 1 &
Arturo Lance Porfillio ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3685-2881 1 , 2

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 9 , Article number: 384 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

3027 Accesses

3 Citations

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Cultural and media studies

The rise of the far right is threatening the antifascist consensus that helped rebuild Europe and the world following World War II. Discourse studies have done much to further the understanding of the success as well as the fallacies of the discourses of far-right movements and have provided the means by which to comprehend right-wing communicative strategies. However, it has also been said that the reactions of the democratic majority and the mainstream media have contributed—mainly involuntarily—to the success of right-wing politics. The role of the reactions of society, the democratic majority and the mainstream media in trying to counter right-wing discourses is widely underexplored. The aim of this contribution is to understand the diverse material and symbolic effects of certain practices of political contestation. It aims to help elaborate counterstrategies against the threat of the far right and to present communicative strategies against hate. With the help of such diverse authors as Foucault, Goffman or Habermas, we will show how democratic positions seem to be in an ideological dilemma in which the speech acts that try to counter far-right discourses very often produce the opposite effect. The article can help to overcome the pitfalls and performative contradictions of some discursive practices especially in public communications.

Hate speech revisited in Romanian political discourse: from the Legion of the Archangel Michael (1927–1941) to AUR (2020–present day)

Biopolitics of othering during the COVID-19 pandemic

Transmediatisation of the Covid-19 crisis in Brazil: The emergence of (bio-/geo-)political repertoires of (re-)interpretation

Introduction.

The rise of the far right is threatening the antifascist consensus that helped rebuild Europe and the world following World War II. However, the electoral threat presented by far-right parties is only one manifestation of a deeper social phenomenon. The Western world has never been free of either open or latent racism even in times when there was little parliamentary representation of openly racist parties. The visibility of far-right parties and their threat to established politics are bringing the topic of racism to the public agenda. At the same time, a rising, highly educated and politically conscious group of members of racialized minorities is raising its voice in the public sphere.

Two of these voices in the public debate are those of Özlem Cekic and Reni Eddo-Lodge. Both women are European citizens who belong to minorities and try to counter racism. Both used social media to spur public debate and wrote a book to explain their approach. Despite their similarities, these individuals are situated at two different points in the debate on how to best overcome racism.

Özlem Cikec was the first Muslim MP in the Danish Parliament. Born in Ankara with Kurdish roots, Cikec came of age and became politically active in Denmark. After entering Parliament in 2007, she became accustomed to receiving racist hate mail. Her decision to visit the senders of these mails at their homes and have coffee together to talk about politics brought her international visibility. Her TED talk and hashtag #dialoguecoffee garnered broader attention. Her experiences are detailed in the book “Overcoming Hate through Dialogue. Confronting Prejudice, Racism, and Bigotry with Conversation—and Coffee” (Cekic, 2020 ).

In 2017, which was the same year as the first publication of this book, the Black British journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge published “Why I’m no longer talking to White People about Race” (expanded version: 2018). Of course, the author is fully aware of the paradox in the title. In the Facebook post that gave rise to the book, Eddo-Lodge knew that she was speaking, perhaps even mostly, to White people. Her refusal of dialogue stems from her awareness of the underlying power structures—here referring mainly to those of structural racism—that exist in dialogical situations.

Whether to talk with or to racists is the question that this research essay attempts to answer. Starting from the assumption that the role of social reactions, the democratic majority and the mainstream media in trying to counter right-wing discourses is widely underexplored, the aim of this article is to understand the diverse material and symbolic effects of certain practices of political contestation. It aims to help elaborate counterstrategies against the threat of the far right and to present communicative strategies against hate.

Discourse studies, with their attention not only to language but also to power relations, normative frameworks, and the combination of symbolic and material reality, seem especially promising in understanding what exactly happens when talking with racists. With the help of ideas from diverse authors such as Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, and Jürgen Habermas, we will show how democratic positions seem to be in an ideological dilemma in which speech acts that try to counter far-right discourses very often produce the opposite effect. We will use the books by Reni Eddo-Lodge and Özlem Cekic as guiding threads to exemplify these arguments and to connect them from a theoretical level to the practice of antiracist activists.

At the same time, relating theoretical reflections to specific practices of racialized speakers will prevent us from prematurely drawing generalisations about communicative strategies. As the speakers themselves are also part of the complex context of discourse, the particular situation of discourse participants must be taken into account. Being female, racialized, and well educated, as in the case of Cekic and Eddo-Lodge, has important impacts on the possibility of pronouncing effective antiracist discourses.

The reflections presented here should help overcome the pitfalls and performative contradictions of some discursive practices, especially in public communications.

Discourse studies

Discourse studies have done much to further the understanding of the successes and fallacies of the discourses of far-right movements and have provided the means by which to contest right-wing communicative strategies. Classical studies, especially from Critical Discourse Analysis such as van Dijk ( 1993 , 2009 ) or from the Discourse Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001 , 2016 ; Wodak & Richardson, 2013 ), help us understand the inner logic of racist discourses and the manifestation of this inner logic in everyday racism. These studies have shown the existence of a racist discursive structure that only seldom appears as open racism and often appears as “racism without race” (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991 ), using codes and metaphors that camouflage the racist message.

As a kind of second-order hermeneutics (Diaz-Bone, 2005 ), discourse analysis does not identify the fully conscious speaker but a social and discursive structure as the origin of racist speech acts. For example, it has been shown that the elementary impersonal semantic structure of racist discourse can be summarised in brief in four basic principles (see Herzog, 2009 ). First, there is a clear differentiation between “them” and “us”, independent of whether the groups are described in cultural, ethnic, religious, or racial terms. Second, “they” are described as inherently problematic. This means “they” can be labelled uncivilised, dirty, or criminal as well as needy and dependent on social aid due to an essential feature of their being (and not due to a hierarchically racialized and unequal society). The third basic principle of racist semantics is that there already exists an excessive quantity of “them”. In racist discourse, there is always too much of “them” in “our” space, or at least the threat thereof. The fourth principle refers to the understanding of society as a limited space, i.e., “container thinking” (Charteris-Black, 2006 ).

Discourse analysis has shown how even in the centre of society, these principles are communicated constantly without being seen as problematic and without being perceived as elements of a racist discourse (Herzog, 2009 ). Furthermore, much research has been performed in discourse analysis on the use of specific metaphors regarding migrants and ethnic minorities. For example, metaphors from the realm of natural disasters are not only exaggerating but also naturalising social conflicts (Charteris-Black, 2006 ).

However, one of the main contributions of discourse studies is the relation of the textual (or symbolic) level of analysis to other elements of social analysis, such as materialities or power structures (Beetz & Schwab, 2017 ). Although there are very different understandings and disciplines involved in the development of the postdisciplinary field of discourse studies, one of its core elements is to understand discourses as speech acts . This means that we “do things with words” (Austin, 1962 ). Beyond the words, there are realities created, things done, and power positions conquered, defended, or questioned. Discourse analysis is always more than a mere text analysis.

The triangle of discourse analysis can be described as the combined analysis of texts, contexts, and practices (see also Angermuller et al., 2014 ). Here, texts refer to written or oral texts but can also be the textual translation of symbols and images. It has even been argued that all meaningful structured elements can be read as text (Herzog, 2016 ; Ruiz Ruiz, 2009 ). Context is a very broad concept and can mean broader sociopolitical and historical backgrounds, as well as concrete speech situations, i.e., the context of interaction, including the speakers with their social positions. In addition, context also often refers to the discursive context in which speech acts are embedded, i.e., to previous and parallel discourses. Regarding practices, these can be caused, induced or shaped by discourses. For example, hate speech can be an incitement to racist practices of discrimination. Furthermore, practice also refers to typical practices of discourse production; writing academic texts, presenting news, or informal chats with the neighbour are all practices of the (re)production of discourses.

Racism is a complex phenomenon with ongoing discussions about its features and main characteristics. Debates exist, e.g., about the ontological status of race, about whether racism is mainly a cognition, an affect or an attitude, or what role individuals and institutions play in the reproduction of racism (e.g., Lepold & Martinez, 2021 ). In discourse studies, racism has been described as a specific form of discursive exclusion (Herzog, 2009 ). Following the triangle of text, context and practice, migrants and racial minorities are constructed in text and speech in a specific, negative way different from other members of society. Migrants are often excluded from the practice of hegemonic discourse production. They do not have the same access to the arenas of the public sphere, such as parliaments or mass media. Finally, hegemonic discourses often produce specific social contexts that materially exclude minorities from mainstream society, e.g., through hierarchical citizens’ rights.

In discourse research, these three elements and their relations can be interpreted in very different manners. At the same time, the analysis of the elements, i.e., texts, contexts, and practices, only describes the objects with which we are working. The analysis, however, is usually not an aim in itself. Discourse analysis often aims at another triangle (Angermuller et al., 2014 ), such as the triangle of knowledge, power, and subjectivation. Discourse analysts are very interested in how knowledge is constituted, validated, or challenged in society. The analysis of power relations can help to understand the circulation of this knowledge. Furthermore, accepted knowledge also helps to ground and stabilise power relations. Therefore, discourse analysis is interested in how power relations are constituted, maintained, or challenged through discourses. Finally, discourse analysts are often interested in the production of diverse subject positions in society, their identity, and their self-awareness. This analysis often goes together with the analysis of “knowledge” about others, i.e., about an alterity from which one’s own identity makes sense.

Regarding racism, we can understand racism as specific knowledge about “the other” that includes categorisations of humans, a specific description of group characteristics and a (hierarchical) evaluation of these characteristics (Holz, 2001 ). This knowledge contributes to the creation of specific social places or identities for groups, i.e., specific subject positions offered for those identified as belonging to a particular set of human beings. However, knowledge production requires a certain power to exist as well as to exert itself. Modern racism is very much related to the state with its power through educational institutions, citizenship laws, borders and policing practices (see also Schwab, 2017 ).

To comply with these research goals, discourse analysis draws from three different sources (see Angermuller et al., 2014 ). Hermeneutically influenced discourse analysis aims at meaning. This meaning is seldom understood as stemming from an original author but more in the sense of a “second-order hermeneutics” (Diaz-Bone, 2005 ) that situates meaning in the supraindividual space of the social. With regard to the possibility of countering racism, this means that racist discourses do not necessarily express an individual’s conscious and intended meaning but reproduce a socially established way of talking. Through discourse analysis, these kinds of unconsciously transported meanings can be made conscious.

Pragmatics, as the second influential theoretical tradition of discourse studies, is interested especially in what is done, i.e., (re)produced, created, and how this action takes place. Pragmatics understands communication as not only depending on words but also on the (symbolic and material) context of interactions. In any speech act, participants draw on preexisting knowledge. For countering racism, this means that this context and preexisting knowledge must be taken into account even if addressing a specific (racist) situation.

The third theoretical tradition that has informed discourse studies is that of (post)structuralism. The creation of order, patterns, regularities, and structures as well as moments of rupture and subversion are at the core of research questions influenced by (post)structuralist discourse analysis. From this perspective, racism is always linked to a stable and regular interwoven symbolic and material order. At the same time, this perspective often shows how this order is precarious and can be challenged and subverted, as internal racist logics are never able to fully grasp reality.

Meaning, the production of meaning, its relation to the social order, and practical effects in reality are not separated but constitutive interwoven and dependent elements. Regarding disciplinary boundaries and theoretical traditions, discourse studies cannot be thought of only from one perspective but must always be thought about in relation to other traditions and disciplines.

One of the main challenges for the analysis of racist discourses and antiracist contestations is that not all the elements of the analysis follow the same line of logic. Racist “knowledge” does not necessarily lead to racist action. The practical translation from one element of analysis to the other depends on a plurality of conditions. In the same sense, it has also been said that the reactions of the democratic majority and the mainstream media have contributed—mainly involuntarily—to the success of right-wing politics. The media maker, through the inner logics of discourses and of the “discursive infrastructure”, such as the economy of media attention, can produce outcomes that contradict the intention of the individual participant. Therefore, even antiracist speech acts can often have opposite material effects. From “performative contradictions” (Butler, 1997 ) to “ideological speech acts” (Herzog, 2021 ), what is said can sometimes be in contradiction to what is done through the speech act. As racism is such a complex phenomenon, antiracist contestation has to take into account the aforementioned different levels and elements of racism and cannot be limited to an easy, well-meant definition.

Power, subject positions and materialities

Armed with these intellectual tools, we can now re-examine our question of “overcoming hate through dialogue” (Cekic, 2020 ) or “no longer talking to White people about race” (Eddo-Lodge, 2018 ).

From the preceding summary, we can understand that it is not an abstract but a theoretical question whether directly affronting racist speech is an action. Speech acts do not exist “as such”. Text and talk are always embedded in contexts, structures, and power relations; speech acts are performed by and to concrete agents, draw on preknowledge and other symbolic and material resources and have important effects. The question of whether to enter a communicative interaction must include the questions of who, when, and how to enter which specific communicative situation.

In her book, Cekic compared the hatred towards Muslims in Denmark with her former (and other Muslims’) hatred towards non-Muslim Danes. In both cases, hateful stereotypes, prejudices, and generalisations create a situation of social distance preventing identification with the other. Although this is correct from a formal point of view, it totally omits the social context and the power relations at stake. Racist stereotypes, and not anti-Danish stereotypes, affect the lives of ethnic minorities in Denmark from their job prospects and health conditions to even their life expectancies. Anti-Danish prejudice lacks this power. Racism is not just prejudice or hate. People have prejudices towards all kinds of groups. They can also have prejudices against white, middleclass men. One could hate supporters of the Chelsea football club or Real Madrid for many reasons.

The formal analysis of hate omits the social dimension, which is at the core of discourse studies. Racism is not only hate. Racism is hate plus power. The term “hate speech” is therefore misleading in regard to racism. Racism includes hate discourse , i.e., speech acts that have the power to create reality, subject positions with corresponding social hierarchies, material effects, etc.

Of course, racism is more than individual hate. I can hate my neighbour or my ex-boyfriend independent of whether these persons belong to a minority group. In contrast, racist speech acts draw from a socially available stock of (racist) knowledge. Specifically, they draw from powerful possibilities to speak from a social system that legitimises these kinds of discourses.

Therefore, neither the racist discourse nor the racialized power structure originates in the participants of linguistic interactions. Of course, structures need to be reproduced by social agents to function as structures (see e.g., Bourdieu, 1991 ). This means that a change in these practices (including speech acts) can change the racializing structure of society and discourses. However, it is not up to the individual actor in the specific situation to change this structure. Although several individual contestations and alternative discourses can change the awareness of the hegemony of particular discourses, every single speech act, in every specific situation, is still embedded in a structurally racist society.

When contesting racist discourses, one must be aware that all speakers are embedded in this structural situation of inequality. Often for participants negatively affected by racism, the discourse is not about abstract problems but about them. Eddo-Lodge states it directly, “If you are an immigrant—even if you’re second or third generation—this is personal. You are multiculturalism. People who are scared of multiculturalism are scared of you ” (Eddo-Lodge, 2018 : p. 19). White communication partners have the privilege of not depending on the outcome of the conversation. They can afford to be uninterested. Even Cekic, who insists on the need to talk to racists, writes about several encounters generating important psychological stress. In a structurally racist society, the racialized individual is in a weaker position.

At the same time, the lack of minorities in discourses about minorities is in itself problematic. It has been widely researched how the discourse about minorities is mostly this: a discourse about minorities and not a discourse created by or with minorities (see e.g., Herzog, 2009 ). This underrepresentation of minorities in discourses that negotiate their public identity creates biased discourses, i.e., a structurally subordinated identity for minorities. At the same time, these unequal practices of discourse production are constantly reproducing the unequal power structure in which specific social groups have privileged access to shaping public opinion.

These structural inequalities, the power effects of discourses, and the different possibilities for access to public visibility and attention cannot be ignored when analysing the possibilities of countering racism. Although it is nobody’s fault or merit in being born with a specific skin colour or sex, one can critically relate to the social consequences stemming from this situation. This could mean that instead of contesting hate directly, White participants could also choose to step aside and let others co-construct the discourse. This practice not only creates alternative speech but also creates alternative power relations where minorities are not the object but the subject of the production of discourses and social structures.

Of course, structural inequality does not simply vanish with the presence of minority speakers. It is still there and can be felt as a powerful oppressive structure for those speakers. However, again, structural inequalities can be made aware by speakers contesting right-wing discourses. With Habermas ( 1984 ), we can understand that there exists the possibility of a meta-discourse. The discursive situation itself can be put at the centre of the debate. In other words, instead of engaging in a debate about whatever topic, one can aim at centring the debate about the distribution of the power to speak, to be heard, and the unequal material and emotional consequences of discourse.

In her attempt to counter racist discourses, Cekic does not follow this strategy. Perhaps she is following David Graeber’s advice, who recommended “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free” (here: Graeber, 2015 ; see also Graeber, 2013 ). From this viewpoint, deliberately ignoring racist structures can also be a strategy to counter racist structures. However, here, we could fall into the trap of colour-blind racism, i.e., the ideology that the best way to end discrimination is not taking into account the ethnic or racial background of our interaction partners. This may seem to be a reasonable approach to achieving equality. However, in our societies, ethnic and racial backgrounds matter. Pretending to be blind does not make these structural inequalities producing discrimination go away.

Pat Parker impressively captured the dialectic of colour-blindness in the first two lines of one of her poems:

For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend

The first thing you do is to forget that I’m Black.

Second, you must never forget that I’m Black.

However, David Graeber does not say that inequalities do not exist and that we have to ignore them. His mention of the “defiant insistence” makes clear that one can be fully aware of the discriminatory structure, but one does not have to submit to these structures. Instead of trying to counter oppressive structures using meta-discourse about their presence in the specific communicative situation, this approach would mean a practical resistance by not submitting to discriminatory structures, deliberately ignoring them and, thus, not taking part in their reproduction.

With Habermas ( 1984 ), we can say that in communicative processes, there is a certain normative basis of the communicative process itself that is presupposed and renegotiated. He mentions the four universal validity claims: (1) comprehensibility, (2) truth, (3) rightness, and (4) truthfulness. In every moment, we can theoretically call into question the comprehensibility of a statement, contest its factual truth, criticise the normative rightness of the relations expressed through the communicative situation, or call into question the subjective truthfulness of the participants. For example, when questioning the truth about a racist statement or criticising the normative rightness of racist language, one is interrupting the normal way of holding a conversation by engaging in a kind of meta-discourse, or a second-order discourse. However, at the same time, by entering this meta-discourse, one implicitly accepts certain norms of a third order.

By debating claims, one is implicitly accepting that these statements are worth debating and that they can rightfully be debated in this specific situation. Now imagine a speech act negating the existence of the Holocaust. Holocaust negation in some countries is even considered illegal. By providing arguments against Holocaust denial, these affirmations that question the very existence of this genocide are elevated to the selected group of speech acts that can be legitimately made in a debate. In other words, even by contesting a speech act, one legitimates its possibility.

In his inaugural lecture “The order of discourse”, Foucault ( 1981 ) described other ways of responding to this kind of communication offer. Instead of contesting them, respondents could exclude them, treat them as “noise”, insane, or as standing outside of the rules of truth production. These forms of treatment are also contestations, but they could be described as practical contestations that do not give legitimacy to the communicative offer in the statement of the other.

It is important to acknowledge that the debate of contesting by communication or by exclusion is not merely theoretical, as one must consider the specific situation in which the speech occurred. It is not the same for a ten-year-old to be confronted with the negationist slogans on the internet as for an academic to counter the negationists who try to discuss this thesis in an academic setting. There are different social spaces where different types of discourses can be made.

At the same time, one must be aware of the available social power to exclude. Extreme positions cannot always be easily excluded, effectively marked as insane, or as standing outside of the rules of truth production. In society where far-right parties have entered important positions in politics and the media, these positions often have effectively entered many social spaces from which it is now difficult to exclude them.

Nevertheless, the de facto inclusion of certain positions into social spaces does not mean that one must confirm this inclusion. Again, the positions of Cekic and Eddo-Lodge can be considered contrary in this regard. By sitting down and talking with racists, Cekic is acknowledging the legitimate interest of these people with regard to, for example, a safe environment, economic wellbeing, and worries about threats to their identities. However, it must be said that even for Cekic, there are red lines that justify not talking to racists. Criminal comments and threats made against her were not acknowledged as legitimate speech acts but handed to the police.

Eddo-Lodge, on the contrary, does not want to talk to people who deny the existence of structural racism Footnote 1 . There are people from the White majority who deny being in a structural advantage or who think that White people in Western society are constantly being threatened by ethnic minorities, thus creating the idea of reverse racism. By agreeing to talk to these people, Eddo-Lodge would have accepted an unequal speech situation in which she would be forced into a situation where she had to justify not only her arguments but her very existence in this society.

Here, the issue about whether to talk to racists must face one important question that has yet to be answered—why should we talk to racists? What do we expect from this situation? Do we want to change some of the basic assumptions of the other? Do we want to change the ideas of bystanders or the public? Do we expect to learn something from racists, i.e., do we accept the idea that racists can make us change our minds? Or do we want to understand racism from a scientific point of view? We use the notion of understanding here in the Weberian sense of Understanding Sociology, i.e., a way of trying to comprehend the inner reasons of the acts and thoughts of the other. At first glance, understanding is not simply agreeing but aims at getting to know the subjective, interior sense of the other. This analytical approach to understanding can then later be used for all kinds of reasons, e.g., to develop counternarratives to racism. In summary, the question could be understood as whether we are talking to or with racists, whether we want racists to talk to us , or, as in the case of bystanders, we truly are talking to a broader public .

The question about who the addressee is of the conversation has rarely been touched by discourse studies. Discourse as an impersonal structure seems to spread all over society. However, it has different effects on those who speak, are spoken to, or listen as bystanders. Bystanders, or the “Third” as Simmel ( 2009 ; see also Fischer, 2013 ), names it can have important effects on the legitimation of communication. The sheer presence of the Third, can change the communication situation and the social implications. For example, by not intervening, the Third is confirming the rightfulness of the communication situation.

One of the approaches to the different effects on different individuals is the adoption of subject positions (Angermuller, 2014 ). Speaking can create different identities and alterities through narratives, appellations, labelling, and so on. Depending on the counternarrative, the result can be the creation of two identities: (1) the good, nonracist identity and (2) the bad, racist identity. The counternarrative could now (a) reinforce one’s own identity, i.e., the certainty of moral superiority; (b) try to persuade bystanders to come (or stay) on the side of this positive identity; (c) try to convince the other of this moral inferiority of racism, inviting the other to change sides; or (d) label the other as racist, thus producing an exclusion of the other and its discourse.

However, counternarratives are not compelled to create opposing identities. It can be thought of as narratives that do not divide the world into black and white or good and bad. In this counternarrative, racism would then be seen as something that is reproduced by (almost) all of us to different degrees (see Herzog, 2019 ). Here, it seems that we are not facing two different subject positions that are categorically different. Rather, we are facing the very same subject position of the racism-reproducing subject. The differences between the subjects would then be only gradual. Nonetheless, here too we could think of two categorial different identities: (1) those who face their racism, thus trying to behave in a more ethical way, and (2) those who deny or even justify being part of the reproduction of racism. Again, the discourse can have the four different effects described above: (a) reinforcing one’s own position, (b) persuading bystanders to confront their own racism, (c) trying to convince the other of their implicit racism as a first step to overcome this racism, or (d) excluding the other who is not facing his or her racism and the related discourse.

In her book, Eddo-Lodge used the first three strategies. By presenting her own position, she is confronting the reader with her own embeddedness in racist structures while convincing the other that such racist structures exist. Cekic, on the other hand, is also trying to blur the clear line between the good, antiracist identity and the bad, racist identity. However, as she is doing so by seeing racism as just another form of hate and prejudice or a different form of framing one’s legitimate worries about the future, she cannot develop a structural notion of racism as a power structure. In a structurally racist society, individuals have, from the very start, different positions that Cekic is unable (or unwilling) to detect for the sake of creating an unbiased communication atmosphere. However, by doing so, she accepts the structural racist bias of society.

Another important issue is the framing of the conversation (see Goffman, 1974 ). Frames are culturally, socially, and contextually determined definitions of reality. These frames allow the participants of an interaction to make sense out of objects and events. As in the case of a painting, frames pose certain limits. At the same time, they allow for certain freedom regarding the content. Therefore, frames do not determine the exact content of what is painted (or said), but they are a very effective way to limit what theoretically could be painted (or said) to a very small unit that is almost impossible to cross, at least if one is to leave the frame intact. Therefore, for example, it has been criticised that, in Germany, there was an unusually high proliferation of television debates on various aspects of migration and cultural diversity and that almost all of these debates framed migration as a problem. Once one accepts migration and migrants as a problem, even the most benevolent speech acts, the most progressive interventions, and the best of intentions turn into a blunt knife. Independent of the will of the participants, what is communicated is the validity of the frame, i.e., the validity of the perception of migrants and migration as a problem. Lakoff ( 2004 ) showed that identities or metaphors could also work in an analogous way. Once one accepts an identity or metaphor as valid, one is bound to its limits, such as a painting being limited by the frame.

Regarding our issue of talking to racists, these reflections bring us to the question of what should we say to racists? By accepting the topic of communication, we already impose an enormous limitation on our conversation. By taking part in a radio debate on the problem of migration, one is already accepting that migration is indeed a problem. Everything that can be said within this frame implicitly reproduces the very idea that migration is a problem.

The constraints of this situation were clearly lived by Özlem Cekic. Racists do not want to talk about racism. They want to talk about migration, Islam, or threats to “our” way of life. By accepting this frame, Cekic is put into a defensive position. In doing so, she then has to show her loyalty to Danish society or share certain concerns about radical Islam. Moreover, as said above, this kind of debate is not abstract; it is about the very existence of Özlem Cekic as a Muslim in Danish society. She not only has to defend some ideas but also has to defend herself . This is the material power of frames. In some of her descriptions of the communication situation, one can concretely feel the power and satisfaction of the White interlocutor in this situation. Switching from a debate about migration towards a debate on racism is almost impossible.

Conclusions

Talking to or with racists is a complicated task. One of the possibilities to overcome communicative pitfalls would be not talking to racists. This position can give the appearance of a radical ideological purity distancing oneself as clearly as possible from racist positions. Nonetheless, whether this strategy is also the best one to combat racism is a different issue.

On the other hand, always praising the goodness of communication without analysing the conditions of the communicative situation can equally help create a positive self-image as a dialogical, tolerant, and open-minded person. However, as we have seen, the outcome of the dialogue does not depend on the arguments interchanged in this situation but on the power structures, communicative frames, and normative epistemes embedded in the dialogue.

When thinking about entering into communication with racist positions, there is no clear, easy, and once-and-for-all answer. One has to reflect about the addressees, the topic, the framing, the bystanders, the material and normative situation, the structural power involved, and many aspects more before being able to assess the benefits and costs of engaging in dialogue.

Discourse studies, with its expertise on power, knowledge and subject positions (the triangle of aims of discourse studies), with its exposure of text, practices and context (the triangle of discourse analysis), with its rich conceptual tools such as materialities, material and symbolic realities, norms, and frames, etc., and especially with its insights about the interplay of these elements, can help to disentangle how the outcome of a communicative situation depends on more than just the words chosen or on the intentions of (one of) the participants. If racism is more than an individual attitude but a form of social organisation, then the question also must be how engaging in dialogue can help to change the underlying racialized power structure. Structures are reproduced by human beings. However, it might be almost impossible to change racist structures without human beings being conscious of the structural character of racism and the racist character of social structures.

Data availability

All data analysed are contained in the paper.

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Herzog, B., Lance Porfillio, A. Talking with racists: insights from discourse and communication studies on the containment of far-right movements. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9 , 384 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01406-y

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AGAINST WHITE FEMINISM

Notes on disruption.

by Rafia Zakaria ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 17, 2021

A worthy contribution to feminist and activist studies.

An exploration of the divisive effects of Whiteness on feminism and a strong argument for transforming long-standing power structures.

In her latest book, Zakaria examines “dimensions of the feminist movement as it exists today, how it has arrived at this point, and where it could go from here, such that every woman who calls herself a feminist, of any race, class, nationality, or religion, can see a path forward and a reason to stay.” Underscoring her case against hegemonic trickle-down feminism are the author’s personal experiences. At age 17, while she was still living in her native Pakistan, she agreed to an arranged marriage in order to move to the U.S., where her future husband, 13 years her senior, promised to “allow” her to go to college. “I had never experienced freedom, so I gladly signed it away,” she writes. Their relationship became abusive, and, years later, Zakaria fled to a women’s shelter with their young daughter. The author describes in studied detail the dissonance between “the women who write and speak feminism and the women who live it,” pointing out that the former are almost exclusively White and middle- or upper-middle-class, while the latter are typically Black and brown working-class women. Zakaria asserts that White feminists “are constructing a feminism that uses the lives of Black and Brown people as arenas in which they can prove their credentials to white men….Freedom is a zero-sum game, more for one group (white women) only possible as the reinforcement of less for another (non-white people).” Demanding anti-capitalist empowerment, political solidarity, and intersectional redistributive change, the author eviscerates White-centered feminism, the tokenization of women of color, the aid industrial complex, and more. The final chapter, “From Deconstruction to Reconstruction,” is a welcome transition from visceral attack to plea for unification. In her conclusion, Zakaria acknowledges that “critique is the first step in a long process of opening debate.”

Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-324-00661-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021

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by Rafia Zakaria

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

Notes on the first 150 years in america.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates ( The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood , 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE

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THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE (ADAPTED FOR YOUNG ADULTS)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

More About This Book

Books About Racism Sell Out at Amazon, B&N

SEEN & HEARD

Coates Memoir Makes a Powerful, Personal Film

BOOK TO SCREEN

BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the pocket change collective series.

by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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IMAGES

How to Critique an Article in 3 Steps (with Example)
😝 Critique format example. How to write Critique With Examples. 2022-10-30
Free Guidelines for Writing a Dissertation Critique
Exemple De Dissertation Critique Comparative
The Best Way to Write a Critique in Five Paragraphs
Trois plans pour organiser sa dissertation critique

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Dissertation emails, part 2. #Phd #phdtroll #phdlife #thesis #phdstudent #dissertation #doctorate
People talking about I speak white, no, I speak English
Arrête d’écrire “L’auteur critique” ! Voici des alternatives pour améliorer ton expression 👌
The White Question: Jews Recognizing Scripture Decimates Catholic Canon Arguments
Présentation de la dissertation critique
Speak White

COMMENTS

PDF L'impérialisme linguistique au Québec des années 1965-1975 : Analyses
Linjure « speak white » parmi les colons 53 « Speak white » dans le contexte russe 55 « Speak white » dans le contexte étasunien 55 La solidarité 58 Le vécu collectif 58 « Nous ne sommes pas seuls » 59 Conclusion 62 Chapitre 3 : L'impérialisme linguistique américain au Québec Analyse critique du roman de Jacques Godbout, Salut ...
Revisiting "Speak White": A lieu de mémoire Lost …
Michèle Lalonde's poem "Speak White," written in 1968 and performed by the author during the Nuit de la poésie in 1970, is a lieu de mémoire par excellence, both emblematic of an era and continually generating new forms and interpretations. The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s ushered in unprecedented changes on many levels.
Analyse littéraire: speak white
L'analyse suivante de ce poème exposera certains éléments qui, d'un côté démontre le pouvoir anglais et de l'autre la soumission québecoise. Axe 1 : Le pouvoir anglais. Dans le poème Speak White de Mohèle Lalonde, on peut voir que le pouvoir anglais domine les Québécois. En effet, on peut obsever cette idée sur plusieurs aspects ...
Speak White de Michèle Lalonde
Speak white est d'abord et avant tout une insulte raciste que les anglophones utilisaient pour caractériser ceux qui ne parlaient pas anglais dans les lieux publics. Plusieurs personnalités connus ce seraient fait crier cette insulte à une certaine époque. Michèle Lalonde, une poète, dramaturge, essayiste et auteure montréalaise, s'est inspirée de cette expression et a écrit en 1968 ...
« Speak white »
This dissertation investigates and illuminates the factors that led 35 Mexican immigrant and refugee youth in Ottawa and Montreal to develop transnational practices. ... Linguistics. 2018; This article traces the afterlives of Michele Lalonde's 1968 poem "Speak White" to explore how translation contributes to constructing, renewing and ...
Analyse-critique-speakwhite
il fallait analyser une oeuvre québécoise université de montréal analyse critique speak white par fortin département de sociologie travail présenté renaud. ... Analyse critique. Speak White. par. Marie-Jeanne Fortin . Département de sociologie. T ravail présenté à Renaud Goyer. Dans le cadre du cours SOL1003. Décembre 2017.
A Sociologist Examines the "White Fragility" That Prevents White
Much of "White Fragility" is dedicated to pulling back the veil on these so-called pillars of whiteness: assumptions that prop up racist beliefs without our realizing it. Such ideologies ...
PDF Speak White" by Michèle Lalonde (1968)
Speak white Tell us that God is a great big shot And that we're paid to trust him Speak white Talk to us about production profits and percentages Speak white It's a rich language For buying But for selling But for selling your soul But for selling out Ah! Speak white Big deal But to tell you about The eternity of a day on strike To tell the ...
"There Can Be No Loser": White Supremacy and the Cruelty of Compromise
Abstract This essay explores the subject of political compromise and its centrality to the politics of race in the United States, arguing that what I call "racial compromise" has been a crucial form of white supremacy in American history. In efforts to establish unity, racial compromise has provided reconciliation by securing the inferior status of black Americans. A unique kind of ...
Full article: Rhetoric's rac(e/ist) problems
A cold open. In 1961, Jesús Colón (1901-1974), a noted Black Puerto Rican writer and progenitor of the Nuyorican cultural and intellectual movement, published A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. Footnote 2 In the title essay, which appears last (as the fifty-fifth entry) in the volume, Colón reflects back upon a key moment of textual engagement from his youth.
Speak What [Auteurs contemporains]
Documentation critique. BLASCHECK, Birte, « From "Speak White" to "Speak What" : Bilingualism versus multiculturalism in Quebec », mémoire de maîtrise, Department of Foreign Languages, West Virginia University, 2004, 61 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise ... this dissertation queries performance's various ...
Feminism Not for All? The Discourse Around White Feminism Across Five
BIPOC scholars have criticized that feminism and feminist activism have often failed to include race, class, and intersectional identities in the feminist agenda (Jackson et al., 2020; Jonsson, 2014, 2016; Zakaria, 2021), leading to a mainstreamization of Western feminism (Phipps, 2020) as the universal norm.Rooted in the Colonialist logic of othering (Daniels, 2015), the dominance of white ...
On white-speak and gatekeeping: or, what good are the Greeks?
5 Lisa M. Corrigan, "On Rhetorical Criticism, Performativity, and White Fragility," Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 86-88. 6 Eric King Watts, "The Problem of Race in Public Address Research: W. E. B. DuBois and the Conflicted Aesthetics of Race," in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases , ed. Kathleen Turner ...
How to Write a Dissertation Critique: Examples & Guide 2024
3. After the summary, you can begin your critique. Write about the dissertation's strong and weak points, its style, effectiveness, credibility, etc. Bear in mind that your opinions should be informed and well-grounded. Don't forget to support your critique with evidence from the text! Example: E.g.,
Sounding white": African-American attitudes toward "whiteness" in the
The purpose of this study was to examine what it means to be an ethnic community member and be told that you "sound white". This was done by interviewing members of the African-American community. The information from personal interviews and focus groups was analyzed using thematic analysis. Multiple themes were revealed regarding the definition of "sounding white", emotional and ...
White fragility: Why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism
First, DiAngelo maintains a US-centric frame when speaking and analyzing white fragility, mentioning the ways in which race is understood based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While she states that white supremacy is circulated globally, I am left wondering how white fragility functions differently in other areas of the world where whiteness ...
Talking with racists: insights from discourse and ...
Talking to or with racists is a complicated task. One of the possibilities to overcome communicative pitfalls would be not talking to racists.
PDF (Student) Activism as a Queer Worldmaking Disruption to White Supremacy
helped build my confidence to speak out against injustices and to trust my voice. Dr. Strunk, when I took your Queer Studies in Education course, I learned that (student) activism was a line of inquiry and inevitably sparked this dissertation. You introduced me to the world of queer theory and queer studies, and for that, I am exceptionally ...
PDF Dissertation Using Phenomenology and Critical Whiteness to Understand
White supremacy is often only seen by white people as extreme acts of racism, for example, people committing hate crimes or attending at a white nationalist rally, instead of the everyday ways white people participate in systemic racism (DiAngelo, 2018; Tochluk, 2008). DiAngelo (2018) offered a more robust definition of white supremacy:
White Lies: A Critical Race Study of Power and Privilege
Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@NLU. For more information, please [email protected]. Recommended Citation Brainard, Patricia Jones, "White Lies: A Critical Race Study of Power and Privilege" (2009).Dissertations. 24. https://digitalcommons.nl.edu/diss/24
AGAINST WHITE FEMINISM
Fortune 500 CEOs won't like Desmond's message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point. A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America. 9. Pub Date: March 21, 2023. ISBN: 9780593239919. Page Count: 288. Publisher: Crown. Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022.
PDF Hayden White on Historical Narrative: A Critique
to show how White's theory of historical narrative both illuminates and obscures the nature of historiography. My method will be one of exposition and critique based on a close reading of the pertinent texts, primarily Metahistorv. as his most lengthy and systematic work. Throughout I will illustrate my points with references to White's
PDF A Dissertation Critique By: Kanasha L. N. Blue
critique this dissertation to build her literary knowledge of the two fields and in the future, contribute to research that will improve these areas. Introduction John Creswell (2014), notes that an introduction is an integral part of a dissertation, scholarly research study or journal article. A strong opening is essential because this is the ...